Speaking to the future: how voice assistants are changing hospitality at AccorHotels

AccorHotels' CDO Maud Bailly says that the predictive conversational era will fundamentally alter the hotel experience

Voice is the next battleground for tech. The potential market is huge: Gartner predicts that chatbots could be involved in as many as a quarter of customer service operations within two years' time. It's no surprise, then, that many tech companies are building their own solutions, and customers are rushing to integrate them.

One such is multinational hospitality chain AccorHotels, owner of brands like Savoy, Raffles, Sofitel and Ibis. CDO Maud Bailly and her team are preparing for demand for voice assistants, which she believes will be the next disruption to the hospitality industry:

"What I've been doing...is to reset my whole organisation, i.e. allowing my company to become a constant learning company," she tells us. "We are obviously constantly disrupted: we had the OTAs [online travel agents], then private rental, then mobile payments. What is coming next? The predictive conversational era - with the likes of Alexa or Google Home everywhere."

Amazon's Alexa already dominates the smart home space and is making inroads to the hotel trade, as well.

Despite the very-real threat from Alexa for Hospitality, Accor is building its own bot, with which it plans to leverage the data that guests are willing to share.

What is coming next? The predictive conversational era

Phil - or ‘Phil Welcome' to give it its full name - is being designed to anticipate customer needs. "We're going to move from the interactive to the predictive era," Bailly told us. "What is that going to change in the relationship, in the conception of a journey on a travel request?"

Today a guest can use their laptop or phone to type ‘Spa, massage, close to Paris', but Accor's vision for Phil Welcome goes much further.

"The robot is going to check the facts and know that you didn't sleep enough, because it's monitoring your health app, and if you left your WiFi open I know where you like to go, where you like to stay during your weekend, and I know how much you walk or don't walk - and combined with your lack of sleep, I'm going to push you in a predictive way, according to the data, to a spa at Novotel in Brittany."

That seems invasive, but - Bailly is quick to add - it will be a completely opt-in and GDPR-compliant service.

It's also a long-term plan: the bot needs to be trained through machine learning. At the beginning, it didn't understand any context: ‘I want to go to Molitor' (one of the AccorHotels in Paris), would prompt the response, ‘Yes, I like the Dark Vador'.

"With machine learning and artificial intelligence technology he's learning more and more, and we're figuring out how digital - which is always a means, never an end - can facilitate the stay for customers in the hotel."

Although Phil is still being trained internally at Accor, it's also being used in a customer-facing proof of concept now, answering requests through an instant messenger. Guests can ask questions about a hotel, the types of rooms and different payment options.

Speaking to the future: how voice assistants are changing hospitality at AccorHotels

AccorHotels' CDO Maud Bailly says that the predictive conversational era will fundamentally alter the hotel experience

Time for a change in strategy

The rise of the bots doesn't only mean an easier life for hotel guests, but potentially a more difficult one for hotels. If search transitions away from displays and towards voice (unlikely, but follow us down the rabbit hole here), then securing that number one spot will be even more important:

"Nowadays I'm paying for some words to rank my brands at AccorHotels.com highly when people search on the internet: how can I make sure I'm still going to be top-ranked when the robot is not going to deliver 12 solutions, but one?

"And how can I make sure that I'm going to push the relevant offer with my bot - the personalised, targeted offer? Because if I push one that's not relevant, people are not going to use me any more."

Bailly says that the answer is in a data-driven strategy, and ensuring that companies empower the "fantastic asset" of data analysts and scientists to gain value from the new era of conversational AI.

It will be difficult for anyone to compete with Amazon, which leads the voice assistant market through a combination of a loss-leader sales strategy, innovation and its use of massive data sets. Offering guests the opportunity to log into ‘their' Alexa is also compelling.

However, if Accor can get their implementation of predictive AI right with Phil Welcome, then that might be a USP that it can use to combat Amazon's market dominance - if the company can avoid becoming ‘creepy'.

"I'm trying to find an ethical balance between pushing technology as the wonderful means to create a better world, providing fluidity, personalisation, performance [and] net profitability for my business, because digital is also helping business - but to what extent? When do we stop? We are very rapidly touching on sovereignty. Digital is also about sovereignty issues: data privacy, social solidarity, and I would like us to be a good exemplar of that."